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Conservation scientists and resource managers increasingly employ empirical distribution models to aid decision‐making. However, such models are not equally reliable for all species, and range size can affect their performance. We examined to what extent this effect reflects statistical artefacts arising from the influence of range size on the sample size and sampling prevalence (proportion of samples representing species presence) of data used to train and test models.

Our analyses used both simulated data and empirical distribution models for 32 bird species endemic to South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland. Models were built with either logistic regression or non‐linear discriminant analysis, and assessed with four measures of model accuracy: sensitivity, specificity, Cohen's kappa and the area under the curve (AUC) of receiver‐operating characteristic (ROC) plots. Environmental indices derived from …